Sacrificial Offerings Quotes

In a typical desperation for quick answers, easily understood, people had turned to primitive worship as the solution. With less than success. Not only had they died as quickly as the rest of the people, but they had died with terror in their hearts, with a mortal dread flowing in their very veins.

About sacrifice and the offering of sacrifices, sacrificial animals think quite differently from those who look on: but they have never been allowed to have their say.

In ancient times they sacrificed the virgins. Men were not about to sacrifice the sluts!

Sometimes I think about the sly, flickering line that separates being spared from being rejected. Sometimes I think of the ancient gods who demanded that their sacrifices be fearless and without blemish, and I wonder whether, whoever or whatever took Peter and Jamie away, it decided I wasn't good enough.

He dropped the rest of the Cokes into the grave and pulled out a white paper bag decorated with cartoons. I hadn’t seen one in years, but I recognized it — a McDonald’s Happy Meal. He turned it upside down and shook the fries and hamburger into the grave. “In my day, we used animal blood,” the ghost mumbled. “It’s perfectly good enough. They can’t taste the difference.” “I will treat them with respect,” Nico said. “At least let me keep the toy,” the ghost said.

[Religion is a] primitive insurance against disaster. ... Originally religion was merely a function of the self-preservative instinct. Offer sacrifices to the gods and save your crops. And even Christianity, after all, insures heavily against the flaws in this life by belief in another.

I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.

Every idol, however exalted, turns out, in the long run, to be a Moloch, hungry for human sacrifice.

The Igbo used to say that they built their own gods. They would come together as a community, and they would express a wish. And their wish would then be brought to a priest, who would find a ritual object, and the appropriate sacrifices would be made, and the shrine would be built for the god.

One other fact is significant: the domestic feasts and sacrifices of single families, which in David's time must still have been general, gradually declined and lost their importance as social circles widened and life became more public.

The gods are deaf to hot and peevish vows. They are polluted off'rings, more abhorred! Than spotted livers in the sacrifice.

The Ventoux is a god of Evil, to which sacrifices must be made. It never forgives weakness and extracts an unfair tribute of suffering.